This week I've got a note from a fellow deviant (about my previous music deviation) claiming that "the bass is a musical instrument that cannot be played on its own, without a guitar to play the actual music". Oooh yeaaahhhh???! Take this!

Because of the bass & drums natural low frequency spectrum, you will need GOOD speakers/headphones to listen to this (decently).

Music and AS3 programming by me. Hope you like it and thanks for coming by!

Wow, someone really thought that? I'd honestly disagree with them, I think that electric bass on its own sounds more full and fleshed out than just electric guitar (And that's coming from an electric guitarist XD)

This sounds like a really neat groove, you could add some more parts to it (Though I know that isn't the idea) and make a killer track! Awesome job

Not bad, I didn't think bass could be played on its own either. But then I've never known much about music. Depends who's pulling the strings I suppose!

I'm really digging the wavelength effect you put into the visual. I've been needing to look up a tutorial for that effect, a robotic character of mine has a mouth that does it. Did you follow a tutorial or did you just do it yourself?

Thanks! The wave effect came up when Adobe released ActionScript 3.0, where the TSoundMixer class includes a stereo 256 channels audio feedback as a numeric array that updates in real time. With a simple FOR loop, you can poll the array values and plot them on the screen anyway you like. I like to connect them with a line. ^^

To figure this out, I had to dig into the Adobe documentation about the sound-related classes in AS3. Back in those days, the classes were quite buggy and some things didn't work, like you couldn't find the playback position of a sound after you paused it. Things got much better now with Flash Player 10, though Adobe is notorious for taking YEARS to have known bugs fixed.

It took me a long time to figure out how preloaders work. Adobe doesn't make any efforts to make it simple either. In ActionScript3, you have to create a event listener to "listen" to the Event.ENTER_FRAME event. From there you can access the loaderInfo object for its bytesLoaded and bytesTotal properties, which are updated in real time as your Flash program loads. When bytesLoaded reaches bytesTotal, you know your Flash assets have been loaded, and you can remove the ENTER_FRAME event listener and start the main program itself.

This is how loaders work in Flash, but how to make the Flash assets work with this would need a much longer explanation. You know when things went wrong about this when your loader looks perfectly Ok, but the loading progress won't show up until the entire loading process is already finished. This also took me ages to figure out, and there is no simple or short explanation on how to handle it.

Thanks! There's too much injustice about the bass, and I thought it was about time to prove a point here. My instrument is the guitar, but someone must defend the bass! There is no band without one. ^___^

Thanks! I think showing is better than trying to explain what the bass can do. Maybe people would understand its value if we removed the bass from all the music they like, and THEN they would notice the difference. ^^

Thanks! It's *really* hard to get people to pay attention to original music at dA - maybe because most people use ripped CDs from famous people in their animations, so music is always taken for granted. dA has no policy against using stolen music without permission, so everybody think it's Ok.

Thanks! It's amazing how people misunderstand the bass, as if it were some kind of lesser instrument that cannot be played on its own. Well, maybe if people hear this, they can change their minds about it. ^^